[boost] [1.34.0] serialization, spirit, borland and msvc-6.5

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-01-28 10:53:19

Roland and Nicola have being discussing the situation with serialization/spirit
interaction with not-so-comforming compilers like borland and msvc-6.5.

The conclusion as I understand it seems to be:

1. It's possible to make serialization work, by taking previous release of
Spirit 1.6, removing Spirit from Boost RC and  unpacking older release on
top of the tree.

2. The 'out-of-tree' spirit 1.6 does not seem to work, for several
reasons:

        - There's no V2 mechanism to plug out-of-tree spirit 1.6. Both
        Roland and Nicola have patches to fix this.

        - For borland, it requires patching Spirit 1.6 to change
        include statements from ""-includes to <>-includes.

We don't have any regression results with the patches spirit.

As Alisdair mentions, it would be bad to just drop serialization support
for msvc and borland. At the same time, we don't have any idea
if spirit 1.6 is the only problem with those compilers, so I think
here's what we should do:

        1. Nicola sends Roland and me his patched spirit.
        2. Roland sets up regression tests that use the
        patched spirit 1.6. He changes the name of toolsets
        to indicate that patched spriit is used, say:

                msvc-6.5_spirit1.6

        and does a test run.

        3. If results are good enough, or can be
        made good enough in reasonable time, we make this
        patched spirit available from SF -- it can be either new
        release of the spirit project, or new download from the
        boost project with prominent warning that it's just
        for msvc-6.5 and borland users.

        4. We also mark serialization library as unusable for
        msvc-6.5 and borland, and include a link for
        the procedure to download spirit 1.6 and set it up.

This way, we correctly indicate that serialization does not work
in RC download, say how it can be made to work, and have
some test coverage for RC + spirit 1.6.

In case if RC + spirit 1.6 has serious problems for msvc/borland,
and there's nobody to fix those problems, we'll declare serialization
unusable for the problematic toolsets.

Now, two questions. 

1. Does the above sounds good to everybody involved? Robert? Nicola? Roland?

2. If yes, Nicola and Roland, can you work on this plan?

Thanks,
Volodya